Hanging with the Elephant Read Free

to meditate in or rooms to work in, but all that insulation never solved anything for me. I have a little studio in the back garden but I might only be there for five minutes, with an image of the Buddha or a book about theatre or a low whistle in the key of D, when suddenly I would be overwhelmed by the terror of being alone and my desperate need for company even if it was just to have a cup of tea with her.
    And then her presence would relieve me from all my morose introspection. I wouldn’t have to worry about the meaning of life or the bleak prospect of death or any of the other great philosophical issues that prohibit me from washing dishes or making the bed, as long as I could worry about what she might want. When I told this to the therapist, she looked at me for a long time before saying that I wasn’t unusual.
    ‘Many men tend to orbit their loved ones like dysfunctional satellites,’ she said. ‘They obsess about the woman in order to avoid examining their own lives. The minutiae of the partner’s life becomes their agenda. When does she want dinner? How does she like her tea? What she prefers to watch on the television. All those things become a narrative that absorbs men beyond the scope of their own nostalgia. It’s the only reason why some men remain married. They find it soothing.’
    And it occurred to me that perhaps this was precisely why the beloved needed to go to Poland. She needed a break. She needed to get away from me. I may have been driving her mad.
    As a wise woman said to me one time: men spend the first half of their lives running away from women and the second half running after them. One way or another, I encouraged her to go, and I was glad when she bought her plane ticket. Because, beneath everything else, I had a real sense of purpose about being alone for a long period.
    Not that long ago, depression had manifested in my life like my own private Dracula. I had spent months with him in the same room when I was ill and now, two years later, he rarely looked in the window. Although, I suspected that he was still lurking somewhere at the end of the garden, and I was always afraid that if I was alone for a long period of time, he might just knock on the door again. And that fear made me dependent on other people for company.
    Although there is something in me that never stops craving solitude. So for six weeks in the spring of 2014, when she planned to be in Poland, I planned a journey to the interior. I was going on retreat. I would confront the unruly elephant of my own mind and I would use the ropes of meditation, discipline and single-pointed concentration to make that elephant sit still.
    At least that’s what the various gurus on YouTube weresuggesting. ‘Depression is a lack of control,’ they said. You become filled with disturbing emotions, with anxiety, fear or melancholy, and that drags you down. But if you can control the mind – the great elephant of consciousness – you can observe all those emotions coming and going, rising and falling; and you can watch them, hold them, and allow them to be. You can wait for them to evaporate like soft clouds evaporate into the sky or let them rinse your body like clouds turning into rain. One way or another you can bear them and quieten them, until eventually your mind can become as calm as an elephant at ease with itself, or as clear as a blue sky.
    I wanted to stop going about the world like a blue-arsed fly, from one pile of dung to the next utterly consumed with anxiety and occasionally possessed by Dracula. I wanted to be still and chilled and full of compassion for the universe. I wanted to be a blue sky. I wanted to be a calm elephant. I wanted to be what the wise ones in robes on YouTube said I could be. Surely that wasn’t too much to ask?
    And if Dracula or any other personification of my anxieties knocked on the door, I would let them in and sit them down and gently accept them. I had read all the books on how to be